Dell Rolls Out New Precision Workstations with NVIDIA Maximus Technology

New technology enables a single workstation to simultaneously perform complex design, analysis, and visualization tasks.
What if design engineers could work with and interact with assemblies with real-time feedback on the structural dynamics acting on the components? What if physics simulations, which currently take hours or days to compute, had so much processing power available that they can be computed and visualized in real-time?

As the amount and importance of computational rendering and simulation have increased, the horsepower provided by CPUs has fallen short of keeping up. The result is that most companies have come to depend on centralized computational clusters or even outsourcing in order to produce the animations or engineering information needed before a decision can be made and a design finalized, allowing the process to move to the next step.

Dell Precision Workstations with the new NVIDIA Maximus technology have a different and more balanced processor focus, which helps resolve the dilemma of having to choose between functions, or always rely on moving the heavy computing jobs to external solutions.

With Maximus, there is not one, but two GPUs in the system – an NVIDIA Quadro GPU dedicated to interactive design, and an NVIDIA Tesla GPU, dedicated to computational simulation or computational rendering. This also allows CPU resources to be freed up for what they are best designed for: multitasking applications and operating system processes, doing general I/O, and feeding data to the GPUs for high-performance processing and computation. Layered on top of the hardware is the Maximus device driver. The technology introduced in this driver provides the intelligent GPU job allocation, ensuring that the right function starts and stays on the right GPU.